John Buchan

by FERRIS GREENSLET

1

IN WRITING of his fishing friend, Sir Henry Wotton, poet and ambassador, Izaak Walton used the very words I would apply to my own friend, John Buchan: “A man with whom I have often fished and conversed, a man whose foreign employments in the service of [his] nation, [a man] whose experience, learning, wit, and cheerfulness made his company to be esteemed one of the delights of mankind.”

Our first meeting was in March, 1915, in the first rather jolly year of the Old War, when it was felt that Kitchener’s Army would have the thing settled by autumn. The Kaiser and his sons would don the death’s-head uniform of the White Hussars to lead a last forlorn-hope cavalry charge at Sedan or Waterloo, and that would be that. I was introduced to Lieutenant Colonel Buchan at the Fly Fishers Club. Slight, sandy-haired, high and wide of brow, he was home on leave from G.H.Q. in France. I remembered that, a dozen years before, we had published from Park Street his first fulllength serious novel, The Half-Hearted, and I pleased him by praising it.

Of his talk on that first meeting, I recall only an anecdote about old Lord Bryce, which gave a pleasing picture of an octogenarian stout fellow. In the winter of that year, when a show, as they phrased it then, was staged at Soissons, Bryce visited the front. Buchan had been detailed to take him around. In the course of the tour, a piece of heavy stuff droned through the air and landed with a stomach-sickening thud perilously near them. Following instructions, all threw themselves down on the ground. Within a few seconds, Bryce erected his white head, twisted it around from side to side surveying the scene, and said: “When that cools off, I’d like to measure it.”

Our second meeting was in the winter of 1917. The Old War in its third year was getting hard to take. It lacked the excitement and change of a planetary war of movement — reverses, successes, forays, and escapes that can be followed fully only on a globe. In 1917 the front was a single long gash across the face of France. The sound of the big guns carried to England as the line swayed back and forth, now ten miles forward, now eight miles back. Casualties were colossal. In the Battle of the Somme, Britain lost 400,000 men, 60,000 in a single day.

The German submarines were getting in their dirty work with ever increasing effectiveness. Food was scarce, heat hard to come by. Belts were pulled tighter; deep breathing took the place of glowing fires. It seemed as if the war might last forever. English faces became a little pinched but never despondent. Dogged does it!

The brightest memory of that dark, cold, ill-fed winter is of the growth of my friendship with John Buchan, who was then back permanently from the front and established as Director of Information under the Prime Minister. We had, we found, things in common — how many, it took a quarter of a century to discover. We were of precisely the same age. Buchan at nine was easing brown trout from the burns that descend the Tweedside hills at the moment I was derricking speckled beauties from the Halfway Brook that bisects the old military trail between Fort Edward and Fort William Henry in Northern New York. We both fed on legends of old wars, Buchan’s the older. And later we had listened, at Oxford and Columbia, to the same sirens’ song. We spoke the same language, largely Latin, after dinner. Buchan’s mildly Rabelaisian turn matched my rather Shandean sense of humor.

During the war and the first year of “ peace,” our meetings were in London, hurried, with no time for the reflective pause in the rapid fire of conversation. We tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. With the twenties the scene changed to the more leisurely Cotswolds. A country boy, walker of hills and wader of streams, John had felt the life of town and trench which was his in the war made harder, not easier, by “the scent of hawthorn and lilac battling with the stink of poison gas, and bird song in the pauses of the great guns.”

Soon after the war was over, he sold his commodious house in Portland Place and, after considering an Elizabethan residence on a productive stretch of the Colne at Bibury, found his perfect setting four miles from Oxford in the little Manor House of Elsfield, by the Cherwell. It resembled that in which Sir Richard Hannay is discovered in the opening chapters of The Three Hostages.

Like Henry James’s in Rye, the hospitable front door opened directly from the village street; at Elsfield it was set in stonework of Saxon construction. At the back, one looked over a willed garden down sloping shaded fields to the slow Cherwell, where coarse fish passed their sleepy lives unmolested by the fly-fishing lord of the Manor. In the middle distance was a gazebo where Samuel Johnson liked to come for tea and talk with his friend Francis Wise, librarian of the Radcliffe. To the far left were visible the dreaming spires of Oxford — St. Mary’s, the Magdalen and Christ Church towers, the dome of the Radcliffe Camera.

During week-ends at Elsfield — in the course of long tramps through pastures, by spinneys and ancient woods, always in winter or early spring, when the primal forms of the land were bare and we got the essential savor of earth and wood and water — we exchanged experiences and views on books and men, and our friendship became consolidated and assured

2

BACON tells us that talking makes a ready man, but reading a full man. Behind John’s ready utterance was a mind full to overflowing. In a paper on Sir Walter Scott, he has himself recorded what he did during three weeks in bed during the old war —

“In the spring of 1917,” he writes, “I was compelled, for reasons not unconnected with public affairs, to spend a considerable time in bed, and, in the pleasant idle weeks of convalescence, I amused myself with carrying out a plan which I had long contemplated. I had been in the habit of reading some of the Waverley Novels every year but on this occasion I re-read carefully what I considered the best — Waverley, Old Mortality, Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian, and Redgauntlet. Then I read my favorites among the voluminous works of Alexandre Dumas, the Valois and D’Artagnan cycles; Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame and Les Misérables; and I concluded with half a dozen of Balzac.”

The opportunity was special but the achievement not — for him — exceptional. He was a swift, omnivorous reader, but never so hasty as to miss any telling phrase or micrometric nuance. He read the best of the current novels, English and American, biography, poetry, travel, philosophy, always a little Latin or Greek, and deeply in the fields of his special interests, Scottish and English history and the American Civil War.

He wrote as rapidly as he read. In the quarter century of our dealings as author and publisher, forty titles, running to more than fifty volumes, appeared on the Park Street list. It was during the war and the first years at Elsfield that he wrote the sterling novels of adventure for which he is best known to the wider public. Many of them were set down on a pad held on his knees during the daily round trip of three hours between Oxford and the publishing offices of Thomas Nelson & Sons in the shadow of St. Paul’s. He referred to them lightly as his “shilling shockers,” but one has only to compare them with the numerous tales described as “in the manner of Buchan” to see their individuality and pre-eminence.

From The Thirty-Nine Steps, written in the early days of the war, through all the doings of Richard Hannay and his fellow adventurers of the Runagates Club, Buchan’s novels strike a note of poetry and high courage that set them above other contemporary work in the field. What he said in Pilgrim’s Way of Basil Blackwood is true of any of his heroes: “He was of the same breed as the slender gallants who singed the beard of the King of Spain and, like Essex, tossed their plumed hats into the sea in joy of the enterprise, or who sold their swords to whatever cause had daylight and honour in it. His like had left their bones in farther spaces than any race on earth, and from their uncharted wanderings our empire was born.”

The tales were never artfully contrived and subtly phrased, fifteen hundred words a day, like Stevenson’s. Buchan never invented with the pen in his hand; he waited until the story had told itself to him, and then, like his master Scott, poured it out in his swift, small, all but illegible hand. It pleased him and his most devoted reader that in the pursuits and hurried journeys that fill these books there is always a trout or salmon river to be followed, a mountain to be climbed.

3

IN 1924, John and Susan Buchan paid a visit to the States. I drove them around New Hampshire, which reminded them of the Highlands of Scotland. We climbed Chocorua, and John, a member of the Alpine Club, proved a testing companion of the trail. Talking continuously, even on the steepest stretches, he accomplished the ascent in fifty minutes. Muttering “Non sum qualis eram,” foaming at the mouth but trying to look pleasant, I just managed to keep within sound of the one-sided conversation.

We went to Washington, where I sat in the outer office of the White House talking with C. Bascom Slemp, while John went in to see President Coolidge. He came out after an hour, twice his allotted time, flushed and smiling. Asked what they had been talking about, he replied, “Latin poetry.” The President, he said, had shown a surprising knowledge of Virgil and Horace, and had spoken eloquently of what the language and literature of Rome had meant to him all his life.

I inquired, rather skeptically, “Wasn’t it you who did most of the talking?”

“No,” he said, “it was the President himself.”

From Washington, we set out in a large open car for a ten days’ tour of the battlefields of Virginia, where, as Mary Johnston told us later, the trunks of trees are so full of bullets that sawmill accidents are of daily occurrence.

We drove through the fat fields of Maryland to Antietam and Harpers Ferry, and up the valley of the Shenandoah. Equipped with old Confederate battle maps, we followed the marching and countermarching of Stonewall Jackson’s valley campaign. At Port Republic we approached a house marked on the map “Lewis House,” and found old Miss Lewis sitting on the piazza where she had sat, a young girl, on a June day in 1862, and seen Wheat’s Tigers of Taylor’s Louisiana Brigade burst from the woods behind the house to capture a Massachusetts battery on it s front.

To my imagination, fed on Brady photographs and the drawings of Frank Leslie’s “own artist in the field,” Valley Pike and the wood roads that climb through the gaps of the Blue Ridge and the Masanuttons were thronged with thin, bearded men in shabby gray uniforms. But it was John who told me — told even Sam Morison, who had joined us at Washington — the names of the mountains without looking at the map.

From Staunton we drove to Charlottesville, pausing at “ Miramar ” for a glass of the Langhorne sherry; then on to Richmond, and under the expert guidance of Douglas Freeman covered the terrain of the Seven Days, from the Chickahominy to Malvern Hill. There John decided to leave to Freeman the biography of Lee, on the scale of Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson, that he had long planned to undertake. We visited the great houses along the James — “ Westover” and “Shirley” — and turned north again through Fredericksburg to Washington. John’s memory of the trip through the perspective of fifteen years was set down in a paragraph of the eloquent chapter in Pilgrim’s Way entitled “My America” —

I came first into the United States by way of Canada — a good way to enter, for English eyes are already habituated to the shagginess of the landscape and can begin to realize its beauties. My first reflection was that no one had told me how lovely the country was, I mean lovely, not vast and magnificent. I am not thinking of the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite and the Pacific coast, but of the ordinary rural landscape. There is much of the land which I have not seen, but in the East and the South and the Northwest I have collected a gallery of delectable pictures. I think of the farms which are clearings in the Vermont and New Hampshire hills, the flowery summer meadows, the lush cow-pastures with an occasional stump to remind one that it is old forest land, the quiet lakes and the singing streams, the friendly accessible mountains; the little country towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut with their village greens and elms and two-centuryold churches and courthouses; the secret glens of the Adirondacks and the mountain meadows of the Blue Ridge; the long-settled champaign of Maryland and Pennsylvania; Virginian manors more Old-England perhaps than anything we have at home; the exquisite links with the past like much of Boston and Charleston and all of Annapolis.

It was during this visit that, for the first time, I heard him make a public speech. I was astounded and charmed when the quiet, swift voice to which I was accustomed deepened its pitch and increased its volume, taking on old cadences of the Kirk of Scotland and an eloquence I had not heard since the brief churchgoing period of my own youth.

A frequent topic of conversation during the weeks we were together was the part field sports shared might play in international understanding. A little later the manuscript of a new novel, The Courts of the Morning, came over from him with a summarizing dedication to me in verse: —

In acknowledging it, I quoted Thoreau’s fine saying: “The stars are apexes of what triangles!”

4

THE following spring we had a week together, harling for spring salmon in the picturesque stretch of the Tay known as the Meiklelour water from the charming manor of that name. There I learned that he was planning to give up his active partnership in the prosperous Nelson business and go in for Parliament and politics. He was elected by a large majority as the member for the Scottish Universities — St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. It was as if all the New England colleges were to get together and send a single representative to Congress. It proved a loyal and well-satisfied constituency.

After his entrance to Parliament, a graver note came into his writing. The adventure stories skirted nearer the edge of tragedy, and the historical novels, Witch Wood and The Blanket of the Dark, were his most serious fictions. He had the two best gifts for the historical novelist, the love of place and the sense of wonder. In Witch Wood it was the border country of the Tweed, where he had spent the long summers of his youth; in The Blanket of the Dark, the Cotswolds between the valleys of the Windrush and the Evenlode, where in his prime he took his forty-mile walks. Through both the horns of Elfland blow. In these stories, as in his biographies of Montrose and Cromwell, he seemed to have conquered time and to become the contemporary of the three hundred years of British history of which he wrote. He was pleased and startled when I quoted to him, with a tu quoque, the limerick about the remarkable Miss Bright

Towards the end of his eight years in Parliament, he came to occupy a peculiar position of triangular liaison between the two elements of the National Government and the Crown. All three valued his historical learning, his Scottish good sense and discretion, his human touch. Many days he would breakfast with Ramsay MacDonald, circle the duck ponds in St. James’s Park with Stanley Baldwin, and lunch at Buckingham Palace with “The People’s King,” about whom he was to write one of his best books, more fulfilled than any other with the rhythms of The Pilgrim’s Progress that had entranced his boyish ear on Sunday afternoons in the little gray manse by the Fife shore.

In 1934 he confided that proconsular duties and honors were impending. Next year he wrote that he had been appointed Governor-General to Canada, that he had been raised to the peerage, and had selected as his “alias for parties” the title of Lord Tweedsmuir, the name of the little village on the border that stood in his mind for His happiest memories. He said I would understand. I replied that I did — that if I were ever raised to an American peerage, I should choose to be none other than Lord Lake George.

5

NO POST could have suited Lord Tweedsmuir better than Ottawa, no other could have better suited the post. He knew his Parkman and the writings of the Abbé Casgrain by heart; no earlier Governor-General had ever been in imagination so much the contemporary of the whole course of Canadian history, in temperament so completely the voyageur.

During the first years, while his health and that of the world permitted, he visited every corner of the Dominion — by special train, by airplane to the frozen north, by canoe down virgin rivers. Thousands of square miles of wilderness became a park bearing his name. He made quite literally a million friends. When I went to Ottawa, the week of his death, porters, conductors, small shopkeepers, spoke of him with broken voices. Even the French press of separatist Quebec, which had greeted his arrival with epithets of agent provocateur and espion, spoke of him with remorseful eloquence.

With his sense of its historic symbolism, he came to take an amused pleasure in the Vice-Regal etiquette that was observed at Rideau Hall and at the Citadel in Quebec. He never came through an open door. It was closed, then opened by an aide announcing “His Excellency.” Off parade, it was “His Ex.” Not until the spring of 1938 were His Ex and I able to fish again together. Then, occupying the luxurious lodge of an overlord of the lumber industry, we had a short week on the Montmorency. No river can be more lovely. The configuration of the Laurentian Mountains north of Quebec is such that, looking up a long stretch of any stream, one sees a succession of bold promontories, smaller Anthony’s Noses, that give them the look of the Vale of Tempe. The slow curves of the Montmorency were precisely right to produce the effect to perfection. In every curve was a stretch of fruitful dry fly water, with a better than pound average. In the confluent Rivière des Neiges, descending through an awesome series of Devil’s Punch Bowls and Diana’s Baths, the fish were fewer but bigger.

Good as the fishing was, the talk was better. One evening, we returned to the juicy subject of debate we had argued since 1917. Had the internal combustion engine done the world more harm than good? I had always held for harm. It had, I maintained, been a disturber of the world’s peace, bad for the fishing. It had made our knowledge of place more extensive perhaps, but less intensive. Kenneth Roberts had told me that, in preparing for his Northwest Passage, he had spent three days motoring through the country between Lake Memphremagog and the Connecticut River. Parkman, in a note to Montcalm and Wolfe, says he had spent three weeks walking through the same terrain. Locomotion had taken the place of meditation. By providing the mechanical medium of swift attack and aggression on land, in the air, on the sea, it had been and would continue to be the cause of world wars.

After an enumeration of instances on both sides, lasting through the evening, I surrendered to the conclusion more formally stated by my opponent two years later in Pilgrim’s Way: —

“If a man so dominates a machine that it becomes a part of him, he may thereby pass out of a narrow world to an ampler ether. The true airman is one of the freest of God’s creatures, for he has used a machine to carry him beyond the pale of the Machine. He is a creator and not a mechanic, a master and not a slave.”

But the thoughts that chiefly occupied His Ex’s mind, both on the Montmorency and back on the terrace of the Citadel, were of Anglo-American friendship and coöperation. One day he disclosed his thought that a visit of their Britannic Majesties, George and Elizabeth, to both their Dominion of Canada and their friends of the United States would be helpful. Another day he ventured the proposition that the kinship of the English and American peoples was evidenced in the fact that the phrase “a good man” meant the same thing to both — quite other than its meaning to French or Italian or German. Three weeks later, in Washington, he expressed the idea more fully in an impromptu speech to the two houses of Congress.

My last visit with him was in Ottawa in 1939. I came away gravely anxious. The malady that for a quarter of a century had beset the slight body that housed that valiant spirit had grown worse. The Governor-General went through the exhausting routine of his work, but at what cost of dogged nervous effort. Then came the war. He wrote, “We are entering a long, dark tunnel, but I believe there is light at the end.” He carried on the ViceRegal round more splendidly than ever. Some of his best speeches wore made in the open air to troops, in sleet or snow, on cold winter mornings. As usual he was writing three books at the same time: his “Essay in Recollection,” Pilgrim’s Way; his perhaps even more autobiographic last advent ure story, Mountain Meadow, first entitled and still called, in England, Sick Heart River; his book of Canadian legends for young readers. The completed manuscript of the first reached me late in January, 1940. Two weeks later came the report of his sudden illness. The news was better, worse, better again. Then came the voice of Elmer Davis at the close of his evening communique: “Lord Tweedsmuir died tonight at 7.30.”

At Ottawa, a few days later, I was given the autograph manuscript of two unfinished chapters of Pilgrim’s Rest, the fishing book he had begim immediately upon finishing Pilgrim’s Way. Deciphering with difficulty the cursive script, I read the last words that came from that tireless pen. It was the conclusion of an excursus on the prose of mortality: “There is Lockhart on the death of Scott, and Colonel Henderson on the death of Stonewall Jackson. There is the last paragraph of Thomas Hardy’s Woodlanders. And not least there is Emily Brontë:‘I lingered round them under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and the harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’”

Surely it was of himself, as well as of Sir Edward Leithen, that he was speaking in the last sentence of Mountain Meadow, written a month before: “He knew that he would die; but he knew also that he would live.”